


I search the alphabet just to find your name

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Duelling Club, Falling In Love, Love, M/M, Pining, Slytherin Harry Potter, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22624975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: In retrospect, it was painfully obvious that Harry had fallen in love with Tom, he just hadn't realised it until now.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle
Comments: 18
Kudos: 280





	I search the alphabet just to find your name

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be dark, but instead, it became the sweetest, most harmless thing I've ever written... oh well.

Harry should have realised.

He should have realised _so_ long ago.

The signs had all be painfully obvious; how his heart always beat harder than it should when Tom was around, and how his every touch, no matter how slight or insignificant, felt like an electrical current entering his body, and crackling like sparks in his fingertips. Even the simple things like his dreams had always held shadows of someone’s stinging mouth and a serpentine tongue that wrapped around every word it spoke as though it were trying to eat them. 

It was so _obvious._

And quite pathetic, really.

After all, he had come back here with the high notions of retribution and its more heinous sibling – revenge, and yet… here he was, lying in his bed and staring at the ceiling, with a fluttering stomach and sweaty hands, all just at the _thought_ of Tom looking his way. 

It would have been funny if it wasn’t so pitiful.

Even the moment itself was pitiable; the second when the harsh lights of clarification had fallen over his eyes like a sunset’s veil blinding him, except, he wasn’t being blinded – rather this was an enlightenment that had come as a rush bowling him over and knocking him about. 

It had been at duelling club last week. Harry only went because all the other Slytherin’s went, especially Tom, and it was better to be as close as possible to your enemies; to stay close and to treat them with care, as though they were made of glass so that when they broke apart the shards wouldn’t bury themselves in your palms.

The duels that week had been hot and hard, with complex spells tripping off tongues like each one was laced with a stimulant; and the magic – _oh the magic_ – it was intoxicating. Heavy and thick, cramming itself down Harry’s throat and bruising his lungs, but it was always like that when Tom stopped practising and started participating. Magic was an instrument in his hands, and he played painfully well; curating feelings on his tongue and in his brain before translating them onto his opponents with an elan found in no one else.

That particular day though, everything had been so _oppressive_ and the spells that they were using were edging closer to a line that should have been forbidden outright, but amongst those boys with their wits and their ambitions and their money, there was nothing truly _forbidden_. And the thought of that inherent danger made Harry’s skin prickle and his tongue feel so heavy in his mouth.

Despite the jibes directed at him, he hadn’t joined in. 

Rather, he’d sat with the cold stone wall against his back, to the left of the designated area, and there he’d watched Tom outplay adversary after adversary like he always did, and whilst always wearing the same satisfied smile. That look alone spoke of a control, and rawness in his emotional attachment to power. Harry had wetted his mouth too many times to remember during those early bouts, each one leaving his throat tighter than the last until it came to Lestrange. 

He was not an unskilled duellist, merely one with a chaotic approach and a penchant for quantity and inaccuracy over quality and precision. By the time that match came about, no one was wearing their robes anymore, though Tom had taken glamorous dishevelment that one step further and had his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and the top three buttons of his shirt undone. 

It had been distracting for everyone. 

Particularly, when his collarbone caught the shadows and was sharpened to a point, and Harry couldn’t help how his eyes had followed the edge of the shadows down to the tapered line of Tom’s waist. Nor could he help how his gaze lingered on Tom’s hands, watching how they gripped his wand or ran a line of beguiling destruction through his hair, not caring that the curls fell out of their predetermined place and framed his face like thunderclouds framing snow. 

Tom looking like that was the very definition of indecency. 

And that was before he’d even opened his mouth. 

When he did that and duelled like he was dancing, it became a profoundly obscene act that got every nerve in Harry’s body thrumming. Just watching how he pun webs with his words until Lestrange was wound up tight enough to make a mistake, and the air was pulled so taut that the slightest touch could make it shatter, always left Harry out of breath. 

That was how it went every week, and Harry had always assumed that was how everyone felt when watching Tom duel; with a crawling under their skin and an aching in their stomach that no quantity of food could ever satisfy.

But last week was different. 

Last week, Tom had been distracted by something, and whatever it was had hooked his attention for long enough that Lestrange had managed to catch him off-guard. The result was a nasty hit to the cheek with a simple, but nonetheless painful, hex; almost immediately the skin at Tom’s cheek had stung with a hundred shades of pink, each flourishing over the marble smoothness like peony blooms; big and striking to behold. Even Lestrange had looked surprised, and that was his fatal mistake – the ubiquitous error of hesitation. 

Harry hadn’t caught exactly what had happened next because his mind had been too filled up with flushes of pink speckling through his head like petals caught on the breeze. But he was pulled from his pleasant reverie by the sound of a human weight hitting the floor. 

Lestrange had been on his back, breathing hard, his wand out of hand, and Tom was leaning over him. Though perhaps _leaning_ was too impersonal a description for the entanglement of limbs; really, Tom was on top of him, his knee pressed between Lestrange’s legs and his left hand pressing Lestrange’s wrist to the floor. Tom’s right hand still gripped his wand, and it was currently up against Lestrange’s throat – the tip pressing right into the softer skin beneath his chin. Even that intimacy could have been ignored, at least, it could have been had Tom’s mouth not been so obscenely close to Lestrange’s that Lestrange _must_ have been able to taste the words that Tom murmured just as he shifted his knee forward. 

_That_ had been the moment Harry realised.

 _He was in love with Tom Riddle._

Because cutting through the hum of magic that was burning great holes in the quietness, and the shadows that framed their bodies, blurring out the space between them and creating intimacy where there was only comradeship built on contempt, there was just a single image seared into Harry’s mind. 

The thought of being the one lying there. 

Just the thought of having Tom’s weight hovering above him, and the burning heat of his body suffocating him, and the compulsive pressure of his magic choking any remaining life out of him. _Harry_ wanted to be the one with Tom’s fingers wrapped around his wrists, and _Harry_ wanted to be one the one who had the hardwood of Tom’s wand pressed into his throat, and _Harry_ wanted to be the one who felt Tom’s lips graze his own. It was a moment of clarity to realise that the fizzing in his stomach was because of _someone_ , a very specific someone that had always made words stick in Harry’s throat, and had always made his tongue go limp and heavy in his mouth. 

It had all been Tom. 

That week, Harry hadn’t even stayed to witness the disentanglement of the two of them. He’d just left as soon as he could and tried to ignore how every inch of his skin itched like it was a size too small, and how there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen anywhere in this castle to properly fill up his lungs. 

Even now, a whole week later he was waiting for the itching to subside, and for there to be enough oxygen to take a full gulp of air and not feel out of breath, because this was a problem; a really _big_ problem. 

***

It had only got worse. 

He and Tom had been close ever since Harry had so unexpectedly, for Tom at least, arrived here; there were shared experiences, and the whole having a part of Tom buried somewhere inside him, that had attracted them together like magnets. But it was purely platonic, and the type of stringent friendship that lacked a physical intimacy for fear of misinterpretation, except now Harry now found himself craving that very intimacy. 

To feel Tom.

To _touch_ him.

Not to mention, it was getting more difficult to ignore him; no longer was Tom a mere shadowed presence on his periphery, now he was _everywhere_. Harry couldn’t help but be hyperaware of his presence, and it was exhausting to be sensitive to Tom’s permanent physicality. From the aura he had when he entered the classroom, that viscous sensation that was hot on Harry’s skin, and provocative in every way possible, to the way Tom sat in his chair, how he spread, legs apart and his right hand laid flat on the desk, always tracing the grooves of the wood with his nails. So too were there those soft susurrations he made through his teeth when the professor ended the curriculum just as the morality was beginning to haze out, and the ‘interesting’ magic was clarifying itself. 

Harry was _agonisingly_ aware of it all. 

Every time Tom shifted, he felt it as you might feel the spray of the sea on your skin. He bit his lip and pressed his feet into the floor, trying not to think of how Tom might be moving. How his legs might be spreading wider, or his neck might have tilted to the side, or perhaps it was just the corner of his mouth upturning because someone said something amusing. 

He chanced a glance behind him. 

Tom was sitting there as normal, writing carefully, the scratch of his quill seemed to be so unbearably loud in the classroom, cutting through the straying rambles of the professor and the quiet murmurs of a class not paying attention. His eyes were dipped low over his parchment, and his left hand was spread wide on his thigh, Harry could just see the tips of his fingers under his desk; but most poignantly, there was a laxity about him, a contented negligence that was so carefully curated that it was practically an art form. 

Under that veil of casualness, Tom was undoubtedly as vigilant as always; in fact, evidence of the tearing visage was clear in the steady swirls of his handwriting, undisrupted by the professor’s pauses and deviations because he wasn’t listening to what was being spoken. 

Tom didn’t _need_ to listen, he already _knew_ everything there was to know for this class, and he made it look effortless; and, in a way, that trait reminded Harry of Hermione and her own insatiable appetite for knowledge. If it had been possible to allow them to meet, Harry thought it would have been fascinating to watch; Tom would have certainly enjoyed a new lexical sparring partner, he’d used up all the others and Harry himself had never been good at wordplay.

But there was no point dwelling on the impossible, especially when Tom’s eyes flicked up and caught him watching. For a moment, Harry was stuck staring at the colour of his eyes, like treacle and the harsh intensity of Tom’s gaze, as though he was looking right through him, shifting through the layers of his skin and finding the secrets he hid between each one. He’d never _looked_ at Tom before, of course, he’d looked, but not as hard as he was staring now, seeing every line and every detail etched into his skin. Though the fascination wasn’t mutual, as Tom cocked an eyebrow and raised his eyes too slowly, letting them sift through each micro-expression Harry made.

Harry looked away too fast. 

He licked his lips. Focussing on the words being spoken in that slow monotonous tone, instead of the horrid flush that was spilling down his neck and spreading over his chest, bringing with it a heat that slung itself low in his stomach and made his insides burn. 

Tom was still watching him. 

There was no denying the weight of his eyes on the back of his neck; it made every hair prickle and his breath come up shallower from his lungs. Harry swallowed and shifted uncomfortably, moving the desk as he did so, it creaked and clunked on the stone surface and a couple of people turned to look, and Harry willed harder for the hotness in his heart to dampen down.

It didn’t.

And Harry spent the rest of the class being mashed up from the inside out, constantly aware of Tom’s gaze periodically resting on his back and tracing up the vertebras of his spine, working along the stacked together bones until his gaze returned to the spot on his neck, a little to the right of the centre, just below the jaw. More than once, Harry rubbed at it, as though there were a tangible thing sitting there and drawing Tom’s eyes to him. 

But there was nothing, and Tom’s eyes remained. 

***

The longer it went on, the harder everything became, which was starting to feel like another one of fate’s cruel double entendres, and Harry found himself squeezing his thighs together and wracking his hands and wishing the trembling of his insides would stop far more often than he’d like. Everything just felt frayed at the edges and he was being pushed to the edge of exertion, always avoiding being alone around Tom in case he noticed. 

Because how could he not notice?

Tom noticed everything, that was why he was so good at everything he did because he observed every tiny detail with such precision and could discern even the slightest changes in the impression that someone left behind. The first time they’d met, Harry assumed he’d been very wrong about Tom’s emotional intelligence, but it turned out he was just astute at reading the forever altering undertones of someone’s magic and matching that with a learned emotional response. 

That was why Harry tried so hard to never be alone with him. To always have the presence of at least two other people around to cloud-over the readability of a room. Though today, he’d been unobservant. Or rather, Harry had been so busy working on his essay, that he didn’t hear the door coming to a close after Malfoy and Lestrange had finally called it a night and left the room, nor did he notice the sudden quietude gliding into the spaces and coating everything with a strained silence.

In fact, he only realised they were alone together when Tom shifted, uncrossing his legs and placed both, flat, against the stone in such a way that it caught his eye and he looked up. Tom was reading, as always, the book rested on the arm of the chair and every so often his hand raising up to turn the page and make a soft swishing sound as he did so. That moment was still and simple, and Harry just watched how the ever-present green glow that coated everything down here swirled patterns on Tom’s book and on his skin. When Harry had first arrived here, he’d thought that it was sickly but now… it was hypnotising, and Harry could spend hours picking out each shade of green that was speckled over Tom’s face, and down his neck and – 

He stopped that thought. 

Harry couldn’t deny that he’d been having a lot of thoughts recently, all of them involving Tom. Just imagining the flavour of his mouth and the texture of his tongue, and how those elegant hands would feel tracing the curve of his spine or the edge of his jaw. More than once, he’d wondered how heavy Tom would be when he was above him and how warm his skin would be; when they’d touched in the past, just little accidental brushes of fingers, Tom had always been scalding.

Sometimes those fantasies seemed so real that Harry could still taste the heat of Tom’s lips tingling on his own. 

But the silence and stillness were interrupted. “May I ask,” Tom said softly, raising his eyes up from his book to watch Harry’s every expression, “what is it about me that you suddenly find so enthralling?”

“What?” Harry said too fast. 

Tom’s expression didn’t change, and he merely continued to watch, passively, as though he were just a spectator to this performance. “I’m not an idiot, Potter,” he said, though the tone was still thick and heavy, a physical weight on Harry’s lungs, “you’ve been watching me like a deer in headlights for two weeks now,” Tom murmured, standing as he did so. 

Harry swallowed hard and pretended not to see that Tom was walking towards him. Though when he was only a few feet away, he could no longer ignore it, and he stood up, intending to go to the door and hide away his problems under the covers of his own bed. But before he could step away, Tom took made a quick motion forward, placing himself between Harry and the door. 

“Riddle,” he said, meaning it to sound defiant and demanding, but it came out small, and weak, and lost.

“Yes?” he murmured, taking another step forward and closing the gap between them, “I want to know what your sudden problem with me?” This was easily the closest that they’d ever been before. If Harry shut his eyes, he could feel the heat of Tom’s skin and smell the undertones of his cologne, and just pretend that this was all another complicated fantasy that had no materiality and no consequences. 

But this wasn’t a fantasy. 

And with just another step forward, Tom effectively pressed him against the window that separated them from the lake. Even like this, they weren’t touching, but they might as well as have been for Harry’s nerves were stinging and Tom was so tangible in front him, a solid physical presence that was keeping him stuck in one place. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Harry said, turning his head to the floor and squeezing his eyes shut, wishing, just _wishing_ that they could go back to the moment before he realised, he’d gone and fallen in love. Back when they just sat in a pleasant silence together on the sofa, back when occasionally their legs touched and it made Harry’s stomach jump but didn’t completely jangle his nerves, back when Tom would debate with him, using that tone that was so daringly close to flirtatious. 

“It _does_ matter,” Tom said carefully, the usual clipped intonation that he reserved for everyone else, dropping so that each syllable was relaxed, and felt like it had been rolled around his mouth before final being spoken, “because you’ve barely spoken to me, but you can’t stop yourself staring.”

Harry's stomach rolled to hear that, the platonic concern mixed so casually with a provocativeness that no one else could get away with without sounding desperate, but right now, it just made everything worse. “It _really_ doesn’t,” Harry said, making the mistake of looking up to meet Tom’s eyes. 

And perhaps, it was the way that Harry’s gaze so traitorously glanced at Tom’s mouth, his eyes getting stuck there for far longer than they should have done, or the way he was visibly tensing every muscle, his fingers curling themselves in and out of fists just to work off the excess energy, but Tom hesitated, whatever words he’d been planning on saying just falling dead on his lips. And for a second, an emotion Harry didn’t recognise flickered over his features, flooding them, drowning them almost.

He swallowed, his fingers twitching, the pads pressing into his thigh to stop them reaching out and just touching Tom. It seemed to be forever that he was standing there, awkward, waiting for… well, _anything_. As long as it was _something_ to put an end to this unceasing nervousness; a single reprimand would do, just an insult or a jibe or _anything_. 

Tom kissed him. 

Just a light thing at first, his mouth tentative and the pressure almost non-existent, as though this were merely an ephemeral thing that could be forgotten on a whim if necessary. But Harry never wanted to forget, because… _Merlin_ , Tom was actually kissing him; this was his mouth, and the very edges of his teeth biting lightly on Harry’s lower lip, it was even Tom’s hands pressing lightly into his waist.

But Tom was pulling away too soon and leaving Harry to chase after his mouth. “Is that what you were looking for, Harry?” Tom murmured, all soft and sultry, the heat of his lips grazing over the corner of Harry’s mouth so chastely, even as his hands pulled them closer together, as though they were making up for all those almost-touches, his fingers already tracing up the bones of Harry’s spine.

Harry could only nod and pull Tom in for another kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologise if this feels disjointed; it could, and probably should, have been longer, but I, unfortunately, have neither the time nor the commitment to make it so.


End file.
